don’t conflate type theory as a whole with the MBTI, a psychometric test. the latter is only a doorstep to the former.
it’s nothing to do with behavior either, it deals with cognitive temperament/orientation directly
Conversation
Jung heavily criticized Freud’s theories as trying to essentially boil human behavior and personality down to affect alone, so his theory makes no comparable pretense
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big five is better behavior data collection, but pretty useless as an interpretive practical framework for individuals, because it insists on pulling apart the way different factors interact and treating traits as isolated
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Sorry, but there are at least 4 basic errors here.
Firstly, MBTI is not Jung's theory. Jung had his own theory. Briggs and her daughter are not Jung.
Secondly, MBTI claims to be do all of the things you listed. It doesn't get extra points for actually doing something else.
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it’s functionally an adaptation of Jung’s theory regardless of any of its interior elements or claims. and despite its failings - and the inherent failings of psychometric testing - it’s valuable for the utility its abbreviations provide in discussing cognitive patterns.
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I agree, but A) Jung did it better, in his own context, B) Big Five does it better from a scientific perspective (i.e. the traits are more clearly delineated, neuroticism is discussed, at all...), C) it's not what MBTI purports to do, which is to test personality.
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we’re mostly on the same page it seems. I just tend to defend MBTI as a correlate of Jung since most people wouldn’t care to make that differentiation, so hats off on that one.
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re: neuroticism, that’s a dynamic that plays out *within* type structure, and probably one of the worse things they could have posited as a fundamental trait. I heavily dislike the linearity of big 5 dimensions compared to the differential sets of anything of Jungian descent
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I agree. I just wish they were well-founded differential sets (in the case of MBTI - other post-Jungian theories that I've seen do things quite interestingly.)
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I’m somewhat lost as to what differentiation you’re making between Jung’s theory and its descendants and why. the differential set structure is completely established by Jung (even if only implicitly) when he posits the secondary function. all post-jungian theory rests on this
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I am positing that Jung simply didn't claim it to be anything else than an analytical tool for engaging with others in ways meaningful to them.
He didn't want types. He wanted a tool he could use in therapy, then decided to write about it. We've talked about this before, though.
I have to admit my memory is shoddy on the other theories - it's something I wanted to get into years ago, but stopped short of going in much detail on, so I have many fractured memories here.
I just recall I liked them better than MBTI, as they seemed to make fewer bad claims.
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(IOW, don't feel compelled to take comments on anything post-Jungian but MBTI seriously - I haven't studied them as much as I'd like to.)
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not sure where you got the idea that he didn’t want types, considering the title and how every chapter has “types” in the name. I also take the view that type is more like a seed of origin than a container of classification, corresponds with his symbolic transformation ideas
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I mean he didn't want types as MBTI posits them, just to be clear. But more on that later.
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